WHO Declares Flu Pandemic

The World Health Organization says the spread of swine flu has created the first global flu epidemic in 41 years.

The announcement came Thursday as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere to near 30,000 cases.

In a statement sent to health officials, WHO said it decided to raise the pandemic warning level from phase 5 to 6 - its highest alert. They also urged that nations NOT close borders.

Flu vaccine makers have been working since last month on a swine flu vaccine. Glaxo-Smith-Kline spokesman S. Rea said the company was ready to start making swine flu vaccine in large quantities once it finished its regular flu vaccine production in July.

It was my understanding that some companies were already working on a special vaccine.

Also, the world population is billions so figure the percentage.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

Not epidemic, pandemic; they are two different animals. Epidemic is a significant percentage of the population infected. Pandemic means the disease (in this case the flu) has become established globally. It does not have anything to do with total numbers or severity.

That was directly from the WHO news release. Epidemic was their word choice. I do not agree though that we have a pandemic yet. As I recall, the Avian flu was about the same in numbers and more died. It was not declared a pandemic.

Slàinte,   

 Patch    

I believe a news organization must have inadverdantly used the word epidemic. Here is the public release directly from the WHO website. (the use of bold is mine)

Influenza pandemic alert raised to phase 6
11 June 2009 -- On the basis of available evidence and expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. The Director-General of WHO has therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to phase 6. "The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic," she said at a press conference today.

WHO website http://www.who.int/en/

Op Ed News Report

It appears that a giant pork packer and hog producer, Smithfield Foods, may be linked to the Swine Flu outbreak which originated in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico ~ that houses a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll which raises 950,000 hogs per year in deplorable conditions : Allen L Roland

Slàinte,    

Patch    

It was listed as both in the quotes I read. I can not agree with either wording yet.

I have people sending me information who present an interesting case that this was a planned event though I am more inclined to go with my previous post.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

Excerpt from the article Swine Flu Origins Revealed.

'Using computational methods, developed over the last ten years at Oxford, we were able to reconstruct the origins and timescale of this new pandemic,' said Dr Oliver Pybus of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, an author of the paper. 'Our results show that this strain has been circulating among pigs, possibly among multiple continents, for many years prior to its transmission to humans.'

Dr Pybus, along with Andrew Rambaut from the University of Edinburgh and colleagues, used evolutionary analysis to estimate the timescale of the origins and the early development of the epidemic. They believe that it was derived from several viruses circulating in swine, and that the initial transmission to humans occurred several months before recognition of the outbreak.

Full article http://www.physorg.com/news163944382.html

That fits the time table of the first case at Carroll ranch in Mexico. Swine have a number of diseases including a pneumonia like flu that is often fatal to hogs. Like the Avian flu in Asia, sanitary conditions were horrendous at Carroll Ranch and workers (the first was a 5 year old boy) became ill. My doctors at University Hospital and locally all say this is a mild form of flu but the same high risk group for the regular strains is still endangered. All flu is caused by a "shifting antigen" virus. That is why a different vaccine is required each year. It is also why something unexpected sometimes pops up at the end of the flu season. This new strain will be no different.

Several of my Doctors feel that those who had it years ago , and there are many in America, may have a residual immunity. Though I caught it the last time around I still plan to get the vaccine when it is available.

Slàinte,   

 Patch    

Patch, I must apologize to you. I find that the definitions I learned for epidemic and pandemic when I was in school are wrong. A pandemic is indeed a "worlwide epidemic". Using this definition, I agree with you that H1N1 is not yet to pandemic status. Though it has established itself world wide, I do not believe the total numbers justify use of the terms pandemic or epidemic. I was under the misaprehension that pandemic referred only to geographic distribution and not to numbers and that epidemic referred to numbers only. As I said, I now find this is wrong, but I wanted you to understand why I was being so adamant about the whole thing.

No apology is necessary!

I remember little of that terminology from school myself. My brother is a veterinarian and we have discussed "cross over" diseases of late. He feels that there are other animal diseases that could be a problem if sanitation is not maintained in mega-livestock operations. He and I both agree that, though it could get bad, this time around we have access to antiviral drugs and vaccines. I am certain that if someone will cover the cost enough will be available for all including the third world countries too.

Slàinte,   

 Patch    

This was published by an un-named group in Mexico.

Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:
Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator
Bertha Crisóstomo López.
The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.

By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”

La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.

It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the “Carroll Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”

Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)

Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs­ anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than 90 degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from pooh and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

Health officials say it now appears that pigs on a mega farm in Argentina have caught swine flu from people. They announced also that swine flu is not as deadly as the regular strains of flu. When I was a child on the farm, common sense dictated that the livestock not be allowed to wallow in their own waste as greedy unscrupulous mega farmers do today. The cross over diseases will only continue to get worse untill we eliminate the crowding and solve the sanitation problems. My brother (a vet.) carries a small oxygen bottle any time he goes into a hog or bird building. He was caught one time in one when the veneilation system shut down and almost died getting out. A lot of the hogs did die.

Slàinte,    

Patch    

As time goes by, I really have become more particular about the meat that I consume. Coming from a Southern family who enjoys bacon and ham it is a major turn. Having had bacon from a friend that raised and processed the hog himself there is a world of difference in the taste alone, not even touching the climate conditions that the hog was raised in. Fortunately I have hunters and fishers in the family so I have access to fresh fish and venison.

This raises the question ... are we willing to pay for higher quality meat in a time when money is so tight or are we going without the meat?

Flora

The best meat is "free range" meat. That is, animals that are loosely penned and not crowded. Otherwise the animal is stressed and the taste is affected. Pigs in crowded conditions will regularly resort to cannibalism so the ham, bacon and sausage you buy in the grocery store came from a hog that probably has helped kill and devour one of it's fellow critters. I believe that pigs can be raised on small farms at a profit as some farmers here do it. The mega farms make about the same profit after animal losses, medications, equipment and the cost of ventilating the facilities is figured in the books. Instead of making the profit on each of 50 animals on a small farm, the mega farms make the same profit on each of tens of thousands of animals.

My brother said that when the disease begins to be passed back and forth between humans and animals, as appears to be happening now, we have gone way too far.

The hog and turkey farms here employ very few people but those who are ill are not allowed to work. Those working wear special coveralls, masks and disinfected boots /gloves while working. All protective equipment is changed as they go from building to building and that is not to protect us but to keep animal losses down. They must know something.

We have mega farms in my county raising dairy cattle, hogs and turkeys. There are sanitation problems (water wells) and we are producing the biggest flies you can imagine. Those come from composting the dead animals. There is not enough land upon which to spread the waste and it is spilled on the roads as it is being hauled to the fields in liquid form. If you drive through it and park in your garage, your garage/house smells like a barn. Air freshener does nothing to mask the odor. Since disease is in the waste, I probably am bringing it home. I have to drive 30 miles to a car wash that can thoroughly clean the under carriage of the car.

I suspect that corporate greed may be our downfall.

Since Smithfield Farms was the culprit in the start of this particular flu, I refuse to buy their products. Not because it is dangerous because it is not but to send them a message. Locally we have 4 grocery outlets and all of Smithfields products are now in the "discount-close out" store and not selling there.

Slàinte,    

Patch